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Hospital improves wait-time ranking

Kingston Health Sciences Centre has made great strides in improving the stress and congestion that contribute to emergency room wait times, according to a news release from the centre.

The facility says it has made impressive and recent improvements in “rankings for wait times in Ontario hospitals.”

In the provincial rankings, KHSC improved from 53rd to 28th in overall wait times in its emergency rooms and has improved from 61st to 24th when it comes to admitting patients to a bed in an inpatient unit.

“It’s unheard of to climb the rankings so quickly, especially considering the types of complex cases that arrive at our [Kingston General Hospital] site,” Carol McIntosh, director of ambulatory clinics and emergency care, said. “With support and the hard work of teams across the hospital, we are improving faster than everyone else.”

Staff at KHSC have spent the past year working on ways to improve wait times and, according to the report, have succeeded in cutting the time “a patient spent waiting in the emergency department for an inpatient hospital bed by nearly half.”

“I think that it’s really down to the staff who have been doing an absolutely tremendous job,” Sophie Kiwala, Kingston and the Islands MPP, said. “The whole team has worked seamlessly, working with emergency room staff and working with the paramedics. The inpatient and on-the-floor staff and nursing staff have all worked together. They’ve got the admission transfer unit up and running as well. It’s everything coming together to make sure that patients are transferred out of the emergency room as quickly as possible.”

The admission transfer unit (ATU) located at the Kingston General Hospital site improves “patient flow by freeing up emergency department beds that are occupied by patients who have been admitted to the hospital and are waiting for an inpatient bed upstairs.”

The repurposed ATU space was opened in March 2017.

“After patients have been admitted, they need to wait for a bed to open up on an inpatient unit. By moving admitted patients into the ATU while they wait for a bed, we can free up spaces for patients to come into the ER to be seen by our health-care teams, which decreases wait times,” McIntosh said.

The province provided funding to KHSC in response to fluctuating volumes of patients during flu season to open extra surge beds.

“One of the things that I think that I would like to point to is the fact that across the province [the provincial government] supported additional flu beds, called surge beds, and in Kingston General Hospital we provided funding for 27 extra beds and that’s something that certainly helped,” Kiwala said. “I’m over the moon proud of all of the work that’s been done in health care in Kingston and, in particular, I think that the amalgamation has been good and allowed both hospitals to work together seamlessly and the exchange of information is all working. I’m always bragging about this community every chance that I get, and I think we’ve made great strides in the health-care area.”

“Staff on the inpatient floors made phenomenal efforts while under a tremendous amount of pressure to care for these extra patients,” McIntosh said. “While we see the end result of these efforts in emergency wait times, these improvements during a time of increased patient volumes could not happen without the hard work and dedication of every department in the hospital.”

“This is good news for our community and we thank our teams for continuing to work hard, both to sustain our improvements and to continue to ensure we reduce wait times for patients who need emergency care,” Mike McDonald, KHSC’s vice-president of ambulatory clinics and regional partnerships, added.